


better than an opera

by lyin



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: (movie theater that is), ...at a very particular college that I did not go to but Googled, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Theatre, Gen, M/M, One Shot, Tumblr Prompt, finally posting on here, from back in 2013, really more of a set-up of how modern amis came to be, references are so 2013 now
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-25
Updated: 2013-03-25
Packaged: 2021-02-27 03:34:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22040398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyin/pseuds/lyin
Summary: The majority of the job at the Apollo Theatre seemed to be sitting around. R was good at sitting around. It looked like the Elysian Fields of jobs.After almost a year at the gig, R was pretty sure Tartarus smelled like popcorn. Apparently tonight he was to hit the job’s even lower circle of hell: at very nearly midnight, a group of guys showed up right outside the theatre’s glass doors...
Relationships: Enjolras & Grantaire (Les Misérables), Enjolras/Grantaire (Les Misérables), Grantaire & Les Amis de l'ABC, more the beginnings of the famous Grantaire crush of all crushes in modern context
Comments: 1
Kudos: 35





	better than an opera

**Author's Note:**

> I recently was talking about this fic with my sister and she mentioned, "I couldn't remember if you'd really written that or if I dreamed it." I really wrote it!
> 
> Happy New Year; Happy New Decade (twenty-twenty, twenty-four hours to go ;D). There has been exactly one time ever this decade, and in any other, when I saw someone else's prompt and went "...oh, I have to write that." This was that time. And this was that prompt:
> 
> https://thegirlwholied.tumblr.com/post/46282754109/combeferreleguide
> 
> "No okay someone make this happen. Modern au where R works at this theatre but at night this golden haired god uses the space sometimes to have these social justice meetings or whatever and he has to stay for the meeting because he works there and shit. But he doesn’t know what to call Enjolras so he just calls him Apollo and it’s funny and cute and shit"

What made working at the Apollo Theatre so especially awful for R was he really thought he’d like it. Getting his hopes up was always just a set-up for Fate to have a laugh at him. As a Classics major, he really ought to have known better, but that was half the trap. The theatre’s name alone made it seem a meant-to-be fit, and there was an opening just when his work study fell through, and he’d been actually missing the film courses he dropped when he switched out of Art and Art History. The building had its own charm, part of quaint downtown Oberlin for almost a century, preserved and repaired and owned by the college now.

And the majority of the job seemed to be sitting around. R was good at sitting around. It looked like the Elysian Fields of jobs.

After almost a year at the gig, R was pretty sure Tartarus smelled like popcorn. The nut-job head of campus police was always sticking his beaky nose around, as if a riot was about to break out at a small-time theatre, and at the worst times. R’s flask still had a sickening salt-and-butter residue from the last surprise pop-in, when he’d had to toss it into the popcorn machine.

And it was leaving him with a still-more-sour view at humanity. This was a liberal campus, famous for its early progressivism and tolerance, and even here, he’d still heard a whole pack of kids walk out complaining an adaptation had made “all the cool characters black”. Yeah. R hadn’t expected trash like that, or anywhere near as much of it as he heard, any more than he’d been prepared for the amount of left-behind litter he had to nightly clean up. Then there was the guy who showed up multiple nights in a week, buying a tub of popcorn for his girl-of-the-night— never the same one twice. He could understand no one ever tipping, as he was himself strapped for cash and it wasn’t like he was a making-under-minimum waiter, but there was the way kids his age, buying tickets or food from him, looked right through him, spoke to him like he was an automated machine. He didn’t know what he’d been thinking, taking a job where he was constantly around people. R hated people. And most of the films were shit, too.

The last film ended around 11:30, thankfully, and he had a full bottle of cheap rum waiting in his apartment, to down while he typed out his scribbled-on-napkins essay that had been due a week or so ago. The manager always took off after tickets for the last show were sold, so R locked up alone; his manager had a shockingly bad grasp of R’s ability to handle responsibility. He did a half-assed sweep, threw out the usual trash, and made for the keys. 

So it was very nearly midnight when a group of guys showed up right outside the theatre’s glass doors. A guy with glasses started politely knocking, but another tried the door and sauntered on through. The others followed in a stream. R as usual hadn’t gotten around to locking it or switching the closed sign over; people seemed to get the gist once he turned off the marquee sign. Apparently tonight he was to hit the job’s even lower circle of hell. 

“There’s no midnight show,” he called, hoping there wouldn’t be trouble. He’d been in a few fights in high school and always ended up on the bloody side of it, and that was before he’d taken up chain-smoking. “There’s a giant sign out front saying as much.”

The first guy in hopped over the red velvet rope and waved at R like he knew him. After a moment, R recognized the guy’s flopping curls and baby-faced slyness; it was tub-of-popcorn-for-girl-of-the-night guy. R was not a fan of this guy. 

“Presuming you read might, of course, be asking too much,” R sighed. “What do you want?”

"We read,” one guy said, sounding stung as he stepped out from the pack, and R realized he knew this one on sight, too, from his bygone sophomore year art classes. But at the same time, tub-of-popcorn guy said, “A private showing!” with enthusiasm that R found very ominous.

He counted at least seven. If they jumped him, he was screwed, in every sense.

“That’s not strictly accurate,” glasses-guy said, “though we’d be interested in using the projector at some date— we’re looking for a meeting-place, and, well, everything else is closed down.”

"You’re a club?” R said. He gave them a once-over and couldn’t mentally fit them anywhere. Beside the ruddy-faced art student he recognized was some jacked jock-type. Glasses-guy had that pre-professional golf-shirt look going. And then there was some ponytailed dude wearing what looked like a pirate shirt with weather-inappropriate Bermuda shorts and untied boat shoes. His first guess would have been theater club, but then surely there would have been some girls. “I gather you’re not the rugby team.”

“I am on the rugby team,” the jock guy in the back offered, with surprise, and then promptly moved aside when someone pushed him from behind. 

There was an eighth guy in the back whom R hadn’t seen, and he was suddenly unsure how he’d missed him. He was not the tallest of the group, but he suddenly seemed to be, as all of them, even tub-of-popcorn guy, moved to give him space. He had very light hair and skin and even lighter, brighter eyes, and as he crossed his arms over his red shirt, he managed to imbue startling gravity and intensity into even that small, slow movement. He was, R had to recognize, a frighteningly pretty boy. He was not someone R had ever passed on campus before. He would have been impossible not to notice, rather like a sculpture of a young god by a Praxiteles or Bernini, someone capable of taking marble and turning into something softly Pygmalion-esque. 

And he was speaking. “We,” he said, “are a collection of friends who chose this school intent on becoming part of a larger movement towards equality and a better future and find the current extent of service projects and activism on campus woefully inadequate.” 

“I wouldn’t say woefully,” glasses-guy interrupted. “Alternative spring break in New Orleans was very—”

"Under-attended, and you’re the one who raised the issue by pointing out the lack of a campus-associated aid trip to Haiti or the Dominican Republic,” the blond responded, smoothly and rapidly. “Particularly, _comparatively_ lacking to other college’s programs, when—”

The interruption, though, had allowed R to recover from the sudden barrage of intensity enough to himself ask, “And what is it you’re trying to do, exactly, because you don’t seem to have a snappy club name or clear social goal like ‘overthrow the state’—or is this, in fact, the Communism club?” 

“Marx makes many excellent points,” the blond said, but glasses-guy added quickly, “Though of course it doesn’t work in practice. We’re working on a name. And we plan to come up with a diverse system of practical on-and-off-campus goals in order to restore—”

R cut in, “So, you’re Poli-Sci majors forming a think tank?”

“That’s exactly the gist,” tub-of-popcorn guy said giddily, clapping a hand on R’s shoulders; R had not in fact noticed him moving into his personal space but it was much too close for comfort. “Two pre-meds and a few more dabblers, but—” he paused for an exaggerated look at R’s movie nametag, reading, in one great slashing letter, just ‘R,’ “you, Grantaire, are more than a mere popcorn boy. What’re you studying?”

“What’s your stance on social justice?” the blond countered, as if it that was a million times more relevant.

“Grantaire?” R repeated, making some sense of it from his Latin studies, a little dazed by the craziness sweeping his heretofore boring life. He pulled his flask out of his back pocket.

“Ignore Courfeyrac,” the blond one said, brusquely, “one of his majors is French.”

“One of _your_ majors is French,” the-one-apparently-called-Courfeyrac replied at once.

“I, however, don’t overemploy it. Now, social justice?” 

“Never going to happen,” R remarked, and he found himself with eight sets of very intent eyes. He was not used to an audience but rather liked it. “Equality is not part of the human condition, gentlemen, and speaking of, for the love of everything, where are the girls in this group?”

"He’s not good with girls,” Courfeyrac said with a nod at the blond, and then swung his head dramatically the other way toward the one with glasses. “And neither is he. So, ah, we haven’t gained any yet. But we have aspirations of expanding so there will be girls to hit on!” 

“So our group will have gender equality,” the blond said, frowning thunderously, but more at R than Courfeyrac. “Equality ought to be part of the human condition—and, of all places, at least on a college campus, at least on this college campus, but if you’ve noticed recent bigoted graffiti and vandalism, the lash-back against events for equality—”

“There’s actually a group against the Drag Ball,” Courfeyrac interjected. “Can you imagine.”

"Yes, most campuses don’t hab drag balls,” another boy said, or at least R thought, since he was horribly stuffed-up and hard to make out. 

“Well, they all should,” Courfeyrac said. 

“And you can’t all meet somewhere else at a normal time?” R tried, one last time. 

They all seemed to answer at once: “I have night classes” from the art student, and “I hab three hours of labs,” and “I’ve already got caught with too many people in my dorm room” and “all the buildings are locked” and “all three of my fakes got taken when we tried the bar” and “Joly says we’ll all catch our death meeting outside.” And, from the blond, muttering, but still haughtily, “I may have disagreed with the authorities during my first few years in ways that complicate us obtaining official university consent and support—unnecessary to our cause, at any rate—”

"You know what,” R said, “why the hell not? But do your thinking quickly, all right, since I’ll have to stick around to lock up."

“Good man,” the blond said, with the severe pronouncement of a god, and R for the first time in a while, briefly felt like one.

An Apollo, R thought, had showed up in the namesake theatre at last.

* * *

The meetings were weekly at first, Wednesday nights. But some of the eight friends, in ones and twos, started showing up more frequently, especially since R let them at the popcorn leftover in the machine at the end of the night. Courfeyrac usually went through at least a tub.

R, meanwhile, had dug up a freshman-year paper of his on Apollo Virotutis, purportedly to rewrite it for a current class but really just for himself. He was rereading it and hanging around just in case after the last Friday night show (he had, after all, bothered to pull out his Che Guvera shirt), when what seemed to be the central group of them, Courfeyrac and Apollo and Apollo’s perpetual shadow, the one with the glasses, showed up after all. Apollo’s shadow actually apologized for them being fifteen minutes later than usual, looking pointedly at the bottled Starbucks frappuccino in Courfeyrac’s hand. The rugby-playing bruiser and badly-dressed one, this time in a black ruffled shirt, walked in together midway through Apollo’s anti-Starbucks lecture. In fact, for all R knew, they were together. 

R had mostly just listened through the first few meetings, mainly keeping his snide comments in his head since if they went away he really had nothing better to do. But tonight seemed informal, lighter, there was less in the way of the blond pacing in front of the blank screen while his friends, in the seats, heatedly debated gun legislation, less discussion about fundraising for a protest bus to Washington (or some anti-protest, R was unclear which way the debate went since he’d finished his flask around then), more talk of the best food in town and failed revolutions of history.

“Hey, uh,” R said, when Courfeyrac came to fetch more popcorn. He hopped down from his seat on the counter to lean against it, before very casually tiling his chin in the glasses-wearing med student’s direction, in close conversation with Apollo. This was not a question he’d ever imagined himself asking. “Is that his boyfriend or something?”

Courfeyrac, not in any way taken aback, tossed back another handful of popcorn. He shook his head as he thoughtfully chewed. As soon as he finished, he opened his mouth again, and R immediately wished he’d never asked. “It’s Guy Love,” Courfeyrac sang out, so suddenly R stepped back, “that’s all it is, it’s—”

The rugby player came running up with athletic speed to wrap an arm around Courf’s throat, in the friendliest-looking stranglehold R had ever seen. “Look,” he said, “we’ve talked about the singing.”

"Aren’t you supposed to be all for freedom of speech?” R asked. 

“The Bill of Rights doesn’t say anything about freedom of song,” rugby guy replied, but he loosened his arm. “If you must, sing something everybody knows so we can drown you out. Something rousing!” 

"Guy Love isn’t rousing?!” Courfeyrac rasped, and rugby guy released him. “Bahorel’s just resentful he didn’t make the cut for the spring musical,” Courfeyrac added to R, so seriously it was impossible to tell if he was joking. 

Bahorel... if that was his actual name; Courfeyrac’s seemed to be actual but R wasn’t sure whether or not the rest were just what Courfeyrac for his own mad reasons called them; no one had bothered to introduce themselves to R but it did not so much seem dismissive, like he was furniture, as it was them acting like he’d been there all along (at least, R chose to think of that way)... Possibly-Bahorel made a disgusted noise at this and stalked back over to his badly-dressed friend, who, of all people, seemed to be arguing with Apollo pretty passionately, in favor of Art.

“But without the Haussmannization of Paris, no Impressionism! And Impressionism—”

“Bah,” Apollo said, “the end of barricades was still a tragedy, not outweighed by—”

“Marks, though,” interrupted the shadow, adjusting his glasses, “must be given for the improvements in health and cleanliness and prevention of disease—”

Apollo, at this, turned and seemed to seriously consider. The shadow, R had to admit, was not so much a shadow as an ever-present equal companion. He, in the corner, with the stupid popcorn of Tartarus, was much more the shade.

“Most definitely not his boyfriend?” he quietly asked the still-eating Courfeyrac.

“I’m mostly sure,” Courfeyrac said. “Not that I keep track, of course, but Combeferre’s sweet on this girl in my dorm who’s stalking my roommate, who, by the way, makes us lot look entirely sane.” 

“I find that hard to believe,” R said, at least glad to hear even Courfeyrac was capable of recognizing they were all a little mad. The world was crazy and so was everyone in it; it was the ones who didn’t recognize that (Apollo probably included) who were the ones to watch and worry about.

"Oh I’ll have to bring him by sometime and you’ll see,” Courfeyrac said, wisely. “This place needs a jukebox, don’t you think? To complete its old school vibe. "

R thought about saying it was a theatre, not a ’50s diner and not designed to cater to a hangout for a likely-useless and silly group of immature college idealists.

Instead, looking at Apollo, he said to Courfeyrac, “Actually, you can hook your phone up to the movie speakers, over here.”

“Oh excellent,” Courfeyrac said. “In that case, I’m texting everyone to get over here.”

R was surprised to find himself worrying about how many ‘everyones’ there might be; the thought of getting caught and fired, and the whole bunch of boys going somewhere else, where he wouldn’t be sitting around, was suddenly a little distressing. He showed Courfeyrac what to do and left him, fiddling with the chords while simultaneously texting.

R had played his own music plenty of times when he’d needed to do a more thorough clean-up, but no one had ever been around for it. It was a different experience this time, to settle into a theatre seat and wait and watch while Courfeyrac put his top playlist on.

John Lennon’s “Revolution” came blaring through, a little too strong and static-y at first, so that everyone turned and winced. But even before the music came down to listenable levels, R, for the first time, got to see Apollo’s lips twitch upwards. It was not quite a smile, but still, somehow, like sunshine. 

Maybe R was starting to like this job after all.


End file.
